Augustus Toplady

Augustus Toplady (1740—1778) is an Anglican clergyman and hymnist, best known for his hymn “Rock of Ages” which has frequently been included in various poetry anthologies such as The Random House Treasury of Best-Loved Poems (1990).

He was born in Surrey and, after the death of his father who was a soldier, he was raised by his mother. She was from Ireland. Augustus went with her when she travelled to claim some inherited land. While in Ireland he received his bachelor’s degree from Trinity College, Dublin. He also published a small volume of poetry in Dublin in 1759.

A legend arose, concerning the writing of his famous hymn, that Toplady wrote the words while sheltering beneath a large rock in 1763 when he was caught in a violent storm in the gorge of Burrington Combe, Somerset. Although this probably never happened, the story has become so accepted, that there is a plaque, marking the spot and naming the outcropping “Rock of Ages.”

Augustus Toplady was a staunch Calvinist, and was frequently in conflict with the evangelist John Wesley and his followers.

Rock of Ages

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy wounded side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure;
Save from wrath and make me pure.

Not the labour of my hands
Can fulfill Thy law's demands;
Could my zeal no respite know,
Could my tears forever flow,
All for sin could not atone;
Thou must save, and Thou alone.

Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to Thy cross I cling;
Naked, come to Thee for dress;
Helpless, look to Thee for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Saviour, or I die.

While I draw this fleeting breath,
When my eyes shall close in death,
When I soar to worlds unknown,
See Thee on Thy judgment throne,
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Duncan Campbell Scott

Duncan Campbell Scott (1862—1947) is one of Canada’s Confederation poets, and was a prominent civil servant. The first of his eight poetry collections, The Magic House and Other Poems, was published in 1893.

He had wanted to become a doctor, but in 1879 because his father (a Methodist Minister) had influence but lacked money, Duncan was hired by Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. MacDonald, to be a clerk in the federal Department of Indian Affairs— a department he served in for the rest of his career.

He is a controversial figure in Canadian literature. His poetry celebrates the Canadian wilderness, and the life of her native peoples. Ironically Scott’s poetic sorrow at their dying cultures — as Northrop Frye noted — was exacerbated by the national policy of assimilation which he contributed to as deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932.

Despite this legacy from his contribution to, and participation in, the Canadian government’s policies, Scott’s literary reputation as a fine poet is undeniable. His long poem “A Legend of Christ’s Nativity” appeared in Lundy’s Lane and Other Poems (McClelland & Stewart, 1916).

From Shadow

Now the November skies,
And the clouds that are thin and gray,
That drop with the wind away;
A flood of sunlight rolls,
In a tide of shallow light,
Gold on the land and white
On the water, dim and warm in the wood;
Then it is gone, and the wan
Clear of the shade
Covers fields and barren and glade.
The peace of labour done,
Is wide in the gracious earth;
The harvest is won;
Past are the tears and the mirth;
And we feel in the tenuous air
How far beyond thought or prayer
Is the grace of silent things,
That work for the world alway,
Neither for fear nor for pay,
And when labour is over, rest.

The moil of our fretted life
Is borne anew to the soul,
Borne with its cark and strife,
Its burden of care and dread,
Its glories elusive and strange;
And the weight of the weary whole
Presses it down, till we cry:
Where is the fruit of our deeds?
Why should we struggle to build
Towers against death on the plain?
All things possess their lives
Save man, whose task and desire
Transcend his power and his will.

The question is over and still;
Nothing replies: but the earth
Takes on a lovelier hue
From a cloud that neighboured the sun,
That the sun burned down and through,
Till it glowed like a seraph's wing;
The fields that were gray and dun
Are warm in the flowing light;
Fair in the west the night
Strikes in with vibrant star.

Something has stirred afar
In the shadow that winter flings;
A message comes up to the soul
From the soul of inanimate things:
A message that widens and grows
Till it touches the deeds of man,
Till we see in the torturous throes
Some dawning glimmer of plan;
Till we feel in the deepening night
The hand of the angel Content,
That stranger of calmness and light,
With his brow over us bent,
Who moves with his eyes on the earth,
Whose robe of lambent green,
A tissue of herb and its sheen,
Tells the mother who gave him birth.
The message plays through his power,
Till it flames exultant in thought,
As the quince-tree triumphs in flower.
The fruit that is checked and marred
Goes under the sod:
The good lives here in the world;
It persists,— it is God.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Marianne Moore*

Marianne Moore (1887―1972) was raised for the first few years of her life in the manse of the First Presbyterian Church in Kirkwood, Missouri, since her grandfather was pastor there, and since her father, whom she never met, was not on the scene. In 1918 Marianne and her mother moved to Greenwich Village; here she was able to interact with such poets as E.E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams.

Her second book, Observations, won The Dial Award in 1924, and then from 1925 to 1929 she served as editor for The Dial. Her awards include: the Helen Haire Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bollingen Prize. She once said that her favourite poem was the Book of Job.

At the Yankee's 1968 season opener, at age eighty, Marianne Moore threw the opening pitch. In her poem “Baseball and Writing” she expressed:
------Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting
------and baseball is like writing.
------------You can never tell with either
---------------how it will go
---------------or what you will do…

Her Christian faith informed and influenced her poetry significantly. The following poem is identified in a Wendell Berry poem in his book Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013—2023.

What Are Years

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, —
dumbly calling, deafly listening—that
in misfortune, even death,
encourage others
and in its defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Marianne Moore: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Felicia Hemans

Felicia Hemans (1793—1835) is a prolific English poet and playwright — publishing 19 individual books during her lifetime — whose popularity and extensive output enabled her to support her children.

In 1818, her husband departed for Rome, leaving her with five sons all under the age of six for her to raise on her own. They continued a correspondence, particularly relating to their boys, but it is unknown what caused the separation.

She became a literary celebrity, writing on such Romantic themes as nature, childhood, foreign travel, and heroic tales — and even drew the admiration of such older writers as William Wordsworth and Lord Byron. She was one of the best-selling poets of her time. Ironically, such popularity, her reputation for dealing with women’s domestic issues, and the use of many of her poems in school books, has worked against her continued legacy as a serious poet.

The following poem first appeared in her collection Hymns on the Works of Nature, for the Use of Children (1827).

The Sky-Lark

The Sky-lark, when the dews of morn
Hang tremulous on flower and thorn,
And violets round his nest exhale
Their fragrance on the early gale,
To the first sunbeam spreads his wings,
Buoyant with joy, and soars, and sings.

He rests not on the leafy spray,
To warble his exulting lay,
But high above the morning cloud
Mounts in triumphant freedom proud,
And swells, when nearest to the sky,
His notes of sweetest ecstacy.

Thus, my Creator! thus the more
My spirit's wing to Thee can soar,
The more she triumphs to behold
Thy love in all thy works unfold,
And bids her hymns of rapture be
Most glad, when rising most to Thee!

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

William Lisle Bowles

William Lisle Bowles (1762—1850) is an English priest, poet and critic. He’d won a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, and demonstrated his proficiency by winning the 1783 Chancellor’s prize for Latin verse. He followed his family line by becoming an Anglican Priest, like his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father before him.

In 1789 he published a small book called Fourteen Sonnets, which was a break from much of the poetry currently being written by such poets as Alexander Pope. These poems were highly praised by the younger poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge who credited Bowles as helping to re-establish the sonnet as a contemporary form. It was his criticism of such poets as Pope — upholding the Natural as opposed to the Artificial — that particularly inspired Coleridge and Wordsworth. Bowles later summarized these views in his controversial 1819 publication, The Invariable Principles of Poetry.

He also published several volumes of longer poems, including, The Spirit of Discovery (1804), The Missionary (1813); The Grave of the Last Saxon (1822); and St John in Patmos (1833). Bowles is today best remembered for his sonnets, his shorter poems, and for his work as a critic.

The Withered Leaf

Oh! mark the withered leaves that fall
In silence to the ground;
Upon the human heart they call,
And preach without a sound.
They say, So passes man’s brief year!
To-day, his green leaves wave;
To-morrow, changed by time and sere,
He drops into the grave.
Let Wisdom be our sole concern,
Since life’s green days are brief!
And faith and heavenly hope shall learn
A lesson from the leaf.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Kristijonas Donelaitis

Kristijonas Donelaitis (1714—1780) is a Lithuanian Evangelical Lutheran pastor and poet. At age 29 he was appointed the pastor of a small parish in East Prussia where he cared for the peasants of the area. Half of his congregation were Germans, who were supported by the government to push the Lithuanians out of the most fertile farmland. Donelaitis, as pastor, was frequently involved in settling disputes. He remained there in Tolminkiemis for the rest of his life.

The following is from his extensive work, Metai — sometimes translated as The Year, and sometimes as The Seasons — which is 2,997 lines in length, and depicts the cycle of life for Lithuanian serfs in East Prussia. Donelaitis did not publish this work in his own lifetime. It is considered the first classic Lithuanian language poem. Its’ first publication was in a shortened version called Metai in 1818, in both Lithuanian and a translation into German.

Donelaitis, in this part of the longer work describes the fading of summer from the viewpoint of his peasant agricultural workers and the world around them:
------There, where the black hawk fed his young on chicken meat,
------And where the raven brought a gosling to his nest,
------Lo, there, all summer joy and merriment is gone!

He then goes into great detail about a Lithuanian wedding feast, about the behaviours — good and bad — by various people, and finally sermonizes about how the peasants (the boors) should behave.

from Autumn Wealth

Of course, there is no lack of faithful Christians, too.
Most of Lithuanians are men of good character;
They love their families, obey the will of God.
Each day live saintly lives, steer clear of all misdeeds,
And rule their modest homes with kind parental care.

Take men like Selmas, he is worthy of good praise.
A boor nay, not a lord — but a fair-minded boor.
His house is simple, just like any other boor's;
His food each day is plain, of meager seasoning;
He only drinks root beer or water from a brook;
He wears but homespun, three heald woven, linen garb,
Or, in the winter time, a worn-out sheepskin coat.
It's not through penury he lives so modestly,
But to pay up the taxes to the government,
And then to render to the school and church what's due.
Of course, you know full well the hardships of these times,
How we are forced to live on beet soup and dry crusts.
Therefore is it not good that Selmas, a plain boor,
Discreetly manages to save a little bit?
Besides, one does not have to tell how much he saves,
Nor to disclose the place where he his savings keeps.

In case you plan to visit Selmas' modest home,
Well, you will find it clean, and restful as a church.
His table's like the holy altar, neatly set,
And on it rest many selected sacred books,
So that, when all the daily doings have been done,
Himself, or even his enlightened family,
May read the Word of God, or sing the holy hymns,
And ease the miseries of this oppressive life.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Michellan Sarile-Alagao

Michellan Sarile-Alagao is a Filipino writer and poet. She has published a verse-novella (Black, 2020), two poetry chapbooks, her full-length collection After the Sunstone, a short-story collection, and six children’s books.

She came to faith in Christ as a university student. She describes the experience, saying, “When I read the first chapter of John, my stone heart stirred. I had lived in darkness, where words were my only light.” She was drawn to the Word — the one who can love her back.

Until recently she was an acquisitions and book editor at OMF Literature in the Philippines, and remains one of their authors. She contributed to the book Joyful Light: Modern Christian Poetry by Filipino Women (2019).

The following poem is from her book After the Sunstone (2016).

Psalm

I would like you to sing over me
a song of deliverance.
I am tired of singing to you,
offering praises that don't get past the ceiling.
If this is presumptuous,
then I know I am forgiven already.
I am a little girl—dancing, demanding:
Look at me. Look at me.
I am a child ready to play hide and seek,
ready to be found.
Oh Lord, remind us that we were loved into being.
Shout it, if you must.
Let that fact be the music I dance to,
and the song that finds me.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Wendell Berry*

Wendell Berry is an essayist, novelist and poet who lives on a farm in Henry County, Kentucky. He is known for his environmentalism, and his agrarian values. His most recent poetry collection, Another Day: Sabbath Poems 2013-2023 is a follow-up to his book This Day in which he had gathered all of his Sabbath Poems to date from 1979 to 2012. Berry’s Sabbaths, according to Southern Review of Books, are “poems mostly written on Sunday walks in the woods as a spiritual or reflective exercise.”

He celebrated his 91st birthday on August 5th, and has been married to his wife Tanya since 1957. He expresses his belief in Sabbath rest, saying, “the providence or the productivity of the living world, the most essential work, continues while we rest.” This reminds me of Christ’s parable in Mark 4:17 where “whether [the farmer] sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.”

Counterpoint Press suggests “With the publication of this new edition, it has become increasingly clear that the Sabbath Poems have become the very heart of Berry’s work.” I included five of Berry’s earlier Sabbath poems in the anthology The Turning Aside: The Kingdom Poets Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry, and see them as significant to the poetry of our times.

The following poem I suspect may have arisen from Berry’s meditations on Piero della Francesca's painting, "The Resurrection". It is from Another Day (Counterpoint, 2024).

Sabbaths 2020 VIII

Piero

A brushstroke,
another, another,
a day and a day,
and finally Christ
stands, risen
out of his grave,
as this witness
at last has seen.

*This is the fourth Kingdom Poets post about Wendell Berry: first post, second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Henry Alline

Henry Alline (1748—1784) (pronounced Allen) is an evangelist and hymn-writer known as the Apostle of Nova Scotia. Born in Rhode Island, he moved with his family to Falmouth, Nova Scotia in 1760 (which is where the pictured memorial is situated). The family were New England Planters who came to obtain farmland offered by the British government to English-speaking Protestants after the expulsion of the Acadians.

Alline experienced a remarkable conversion in March 1775, after which he dedicated himself to preaching the gospel. Educational opportunities were non-existent for Planters, and so he was self-educated through his own reading. In the 1770s he was influential in starting a Great Awakening religious revival. His New Lights ideas and followers quickly spread across the region and into northeastern New England.

The following poem appeared in Hymns, and Spiritual Songs (Peter Edes, 1786) which was published in Boston. His autobiography, The Life and Journal of the Rev. Mr. Henry Alline, appeared in 1806.

On Death

I
Death reign'd with vigour since the Fall,
------And rides with fury still;
Nor rich nor poor, nor great nor small,
------Can e'er resist his will.
II
He ravages both night and day,
------Through all our mortal stage;
And ev'ry creature falls a prey
------To his resistless rage.
III
Nations and empires he has slain,
------And laid whole cities waste,
And doth his cruel siege maintain
------To sweep the world in haste.
IV
Ride forth, O mighty Prince of Peace,
------And take away his sting.
Then shall his cruel kingdom cease,
------And saints his triumph sing.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Kevin Hart*

Kevin Hart is an Australian theologian, philosopher, and poet. He has taught at numerous schools, including Notre Dame University, University of Virginia, and is currently the Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor at Duke Divinity School. He is the author of numerous scholarly books, including Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), as well as many poetry collections.

His new book, Carnets (Poiema/Cascade, 2025), is quite different than his other poetry books — probably quite different than any poetry book you’ve ever encountered. It consists of 500 single-line poems, or aphorisms. Here are a few of those which recently appeared in Ekstasis:

------If the words rise up to meet you, it’s poetry.

------Everything good was created by God; the rest, by committee.

------The truth is whole but mostly found in scraps.

------When you contemplate, time flows around you not through you.

I am honoured to have worked with Kevin Hart as editor for Carnets.

The following poem first appeared in the Tasmanian journal Forty South. The first half of the title is taken from some very old Chinese poems, and yet reminds me of similar epigraphs leading into several of the Psalms. Lake St. Clair, here, has nothing to do with the Ontario/Michigan border, but to the mountain lake in Tasmania.

To the Tune of “Early in the Morning”

Dissolving hills
Cradling Lake St. Clair:

The milky light of winter
In the early hours,

A forest old as rain
And a cold sky running south

As far as mind can see
With glaciers calving there.

God made the world
With just a breath:

Three days now
Of hiking through it.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Kevin Hart: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Mary Masters

Mary Masters (1694?—1759?) is a working class poet born in Otley, which is now part of the city of Leeds. She is referred to in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, where it’s said she occasionally visited Dr. Johnson, who revised her writings and "illuminated them here and there with a ray of his own genius." It is also known that she sometimes stayed at the home of Edward Cave, the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine, when visiting London.

Her Poems on Several Occasions was published in London in 1733. Her second book Familiar Letters and Poems on Several Occasions appeared in 1755. One brief poem from that book, which has been expanded into a hymn, is as follows:
------'Tis religion that can give
------Sweetest pleasures while we live.
------'Tis religion must supply
------Solid comfort when we die.

Masters included expanded versifications of Psalm 29, Psalm 37, Psalm 90, and Psalm 137 in her first collection. More faithful psalm versifications had already become a popular form of Christian poetry years earlier, including those from Sir Philip Sidney, and continued by his sister Mary Sidney Herbert. The following poem is Masters’ versification and expansion on Psalm 90, which according to tradition was written by Moses.

Psalm 90

------Verse I
Monarch of Heav’n, and Earth, and Sea,
Patron of Israel’s Progeny;
In every Clime from Age to Age
Our Line survives all hostile Rage,
With thy Divinity immur’d
As in a Dome of Rock secur’d.
------Verse II
Ancient of Days! Ere this wide Earth
With all her Hills disclos’d, to birth
Arose; ere you bright Lamps on high
Were kindled thro’ the boundless Sky;
Thou hadst a Life Eternal pass’d
That with Eternity shall last
------Verse III
But what is Man? thy sov’reign Doom
Soon hurls the Mortal to a Tomb:
“Return to dust,” thy voice commands,
Death hears, and sweeps off half the Lands.
------Verse IV
While so immense, thy Life appears,
That, ev’n a thousand rolling Years,
Diminish, in thy vast Survey,
To an elaps’d, forgotten Day:
Whole Ages vanish in thy fight
Like the short Portion of a Night.
------Verse V
How oft (amazing to behold!)
Destruction has her Torrents roll’d!
Born headlong down the violent Stream,
The Mighty perish, like a Dream!
Sad Devastation! Swift and wide!
Thus blooms at Morn, the Meadows Pride,
------Verse VI
At Morn, in lusty Verdure gay,
At Eve, the Sickle’s hapless Prey
A wide-extended Ruin lies
On the bare Waste, and with’ring dies.
------Verse VII
O’er-whelm’d with Terror and Amaze,
We fee thy Wrath, around us, blaze.
Consum’d by thine avenging Ire
With copious Death our Hosts expire.
------Verse VIII
Thy Face, by its own Beams, descries
All our conceal’d Iniquities
Stern Justice every Crime arraigns;
And lays of each its Load of Pains.
------Verse IX
All our sad Days, thy Frowns we mourn;
Sickly, and weak, with Sorrow worn;
And mounting to our Noon a-pace,
And quickly finishing the Race,
The Measure of our Years is run,
Spent like a Tale.
------Verse X
------------------------The deathless Sun
Scarce seventy Springs renews his round,
Ere w lie mould’ring in the Ground:
Or should the vig’rous and the strong
Ten winters more drag Life along,
‘Tis a Reprieve, devoid of Rest,
Harrass’d with Toils, with Fears opprest,
And in our Strength cut off at last,
We vanish: thus a sudden Blast,
When fatal Shears the Fleece divide,
Whirls out of fight the falling Pride.
------Verse XI
Dread Sov’reign when thy Vengeance glows,
Who its full Force and Fury knows?
Great as our Fears, and unconfin’d
As thy own vast Almighty Mind.
------Verse XII
Make us, O make us, Father wise
To mark the Moment, as it flies,
Keep the small Sum of Life in view
And, whither Wisdom leads, pursue.
------Verse XIII
Return, offended Pow’r, we pray,
How long ———? O torturing Delay!
Pity the Pains thy Servants feel,
At length the stern Decree repeal.
Bid the auspicious Morning smile,
That finishes our Years of Toil.
------Verse XIV
Let Mercy then prepare a Feast,
And let our Nation be the Guest:
Till in full Tides our Joys arise,
Our Acclamations rend the Skies;
------Verse XV
Till in full Tides our Joy o’erflows,
Lasting and great, as now , our Woes.
------Verse XVI
Before our steps, thy Pow’r display,
With Wonders mark the shining Way:
O let thy Patronage Divine
Diffuse a Glory round our Line,
------Verse XVII
Thy Patronage Divine proclaim,
Thro’ ev’ry Land our honour’d Name.
Secure of thy Almighty Aid,
On that Eternal Basis laid,
May all our Plans of Conquest stand,
And all the Labours of our Hand.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Jill Peláez Baumgaertner*

Jill Peláez Baumgaertner is a Chicago poet with seven collections to her name. She is also an influential editor — serving first as poetry editor for The Cresset, then for First Things, and finally for The Christian Century — a role she is still fulfilling. She is Professor of English Emerita at Wheaton College, where she also served as Dean of Humanities and Theological Studies.

Her new poetry book is a unique collection — a partnership, really, between Baumgertner and the Romanian sculptor Liviu Mocan. The sculptures, paired throughout the book with Baumgaerner’s poems, clearly stand on their own, and the poems work independently of the images. Even so, when they are considered together the experience is enriched.

Liviu says, “"When my hands touch the marble or the granite or the wood… I touch God's hands. God's hands are there waiting for me… This is how, resculpting His sculptures, I understand, day by day, how inadequate I am. I am a sculptor, I am a sculpture."

Jill says, “We want our book to tell the story that begins in radiance and beauty, progressed through sin to the fall, and leads to revelation and redemption through the vast and tender love of Christ.” This is, in my view, what they have accomplished.

The new book The Shapes are Real (Cascade Books, 2025) is indeed a partnership — and I am privileged to have served as editor. Philip Yancey wrote an introduction to the work of Liviu Mocan for the book, with an afterword by myself, entitled "Polishing Mirrors For Heaven" which also appears in the McMaster Journal of Theology & Ministry. The following poem is from The Shapes are Real.

The book that reads you
------brass
------120 x 60 x 30 cm

sees you; you standing there
trying to read its opaque pages;
stiff, unbendable they seem
yet stacked with abundance
of breath between leaves and brass
that seem almost flexible..

It eyes you. Over and over
through its hieroglyphs, the tiny eyes
see all that you are, all that you
should be, all that you will be.
They are not meaning―but point
to meaning, harbingers, reflectors,

like the light from the moon―
not sun but sunlight still―
reflected yet substantial,
until the morning erases
dark illuminations and unveils
glory―
revelation the patina

covering sheen in the skin
of mercy.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the fourth Kingdom Poets post about Jill Peláez Baumgaertner: first post, second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Boris Pasternak*

Boris Pasternak (1890—1960) is a Russian poet, whose father was a painter who taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and whose mother was a concert pianist.

His poetry collections include My Sister, Life (1922), Second Birth (1932), and Selected Poems (1946). Pasternak is the author of just one novel, Doctor Zhivago (1957), for which he won the Nobel Prize.

At the time the Soviet government pressured him into rejecting the award. In a 1958 article interpreting these events, Time Magazine reported, “Pasternak wrote his novel Doctor Zhivago out of a passionate Christian conviction that salvation is possible only through the individual human spirit.” In Israel the novel was criticized as assimilationist, because Pasternak was in favour of his fellow-Jews converting to Christian faith.

After World War II, a series of his Christian poems on Easter themes, were said to have been written as a form of protest against communism.

The following poem draws an unlikely parallel betweeen an actor in a Shakespearean play and Christ fulfilling the role set out for him.

Hamlet

The murmurs ebb; onto the stage I enter.
I am trying, standing in the door,
To discover in the distant echoes
What the coming years may hold in store.

The nocturnal darkness with a thousand
Binoculars is focused onto me.
Take away this cup, O Abba Father,
Everything is possible to Thee.

I am fond of this Thy stubborn project,
And to play my part I am content.
But another drama is in progress,
And, this once, O let me be exempt.

But the plan of action is determined,
And the end irrevocably sealed.
I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:
Life is not a walk across a field.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Boris Pasternak: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

William Cullen Bryant*

William Cullen Bryant (1794—1878) is one of the most significant poets in early American history. He studied law privately and was admitted to the bar when he was 21years of age. His dislike of the profession led him and his wife to move to New York in 1829 where he became the editor of the New York Review, and shortly thereafter became editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post; he continued in that role for the rest of his life.

His poetry collections include Thanatopsis (1817), A Forest Hymn (1824), and Poems (1839). He is known as an American Romantic for his nature poetry, being significantly influenced by William Wordsworth.

Under the influence of his father, Bryant had started shifting toward Unitarian belief away from the Calvinism of his childhood. In his blank verse poem “A Forest Hymn,” however, he demonstrated a return toward Christian orthodoxy — seeing nature as the most suited place for communion with God.

The William Cullen Bryant Homestead, in Massachusetts, is a National Historic Landmark. It is located on a hillside overlooking the Westfield River Valley, on the site of the original Cummington community which was founded in 1762.

The Battle-Field

Once this soft turf, this rivulet's sands,
Were trampled by a hurrying crowd,
And fiery hearts and armed hands
Encountered in the battle-cloud.

Ah! never shall the land forget
How gushed the life-blood of her brave, —
Gushed, warm with hope and courage yet,
Upon the soil they fought to save.

Now all is calm and fresh and still;
Alone the chirp of flittering bird,
And talk of children on the hill,
And bell of wandering kine, are heard.

No solemn host goes trailing by
The black-mouthed gun and staggering wain;
Men start not at the battle-cry, —
O, be it never heard again!

Soon rested those who fought; but thou
Who minglest in the harder strife
For truths which men receive not now,
Thy warfare only ends with life.

A friendless warfare! lingering long
Through weary day and weary year;
A wild and many-weaponed throng
Hang on thy front and flank and rear.

Yet nerve thy spirit to the proof,
And blench not at thy chosen lot;
The timid good may stand aloof,
Men start not at the battle-cry, —
The sage may frown, — yet faint thou not.

Nor heed the shaft too surely cast,
The foul and hissing bolt of scorn;
For with thy side shall dwell, at last,
The victory of endurance born.

Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again, —
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies among his worshippers.

Yea, though thou lie upon the dust,
When they who helped thee flee in fear,
Die full of hope and manly trust,
Like those who fell in battle here!

Another hand thy sword shall wield,
Another hand the standard wave,
Till from the trumpet's mouth is pealed
The blast of triumph o'er thy grave

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about William Cullen Bryant: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Allen Tate*

Allen Tate (1899—1979) is a Southern writer, born in Kentucky and educated at Vanderbilt University, where his roommate was Robbert Penn Warren. Rather than identifying primarily as an American, he saw himself as a Southerner — holding traditional agrarian values which reflect artistic beauty, rather than adopting Yankee industrialism and materialism.

He was not naïve to the sins of the South — first among these being bigotry and slavery — nor was he seeking to turn back towards an idealized past. He wrote, “A society which has once been religious cannot, without risk of spiritual death, secularize itself.” He was essentially a critic of American culture.

His poetry collections include Mr. Pope and Other Poems (1928), The Mediterranean and Other Poems (1936), The Winter Sea (1944), and Two Conceits for the Eye to Sing, If Possible (1950), His Collected Poems appeared in 1970.

Tate was poetry editor at Sewanee Review from 1944 to 1947, and a professor of English at the University of Minnesota from 1951 until his retirement. He converted publicly to Roman Catholicism in 1950.

Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky

Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky
And I must think a little of the past:
When I was ten I told a stinking lie
That got a black boy whipped; but now at last
The going years, caught in an after-glow,
Reverse like balls englished upon green baize—
Let them return, let the round trumpets blow
The ancient crackle of the Christ's deep gaze.
Deafened and blind, with senses yet unfound,
Am I, untutored to the after-wit
Of knowledge, knowing a nightmare has no sound;
Therefore with idle hands and head I sit
In late December before the fire's daze
Punished by crimes of which I would be quit.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Allen Tate: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Chad Walsh*

Chad Walsh (1914—1991) wrote six poetry collections, and several other books. He served as an English professor for more than thirty years at Beloit College in Wisconsin. His name comes up frequently these days, as Beloit College has named a poetry prize in his honour, as well as the Chad Walsh Chapbook Series from Beloit Poetry Journal. His anthology Today’s Poems: American and British Poetry since the 1930s was published in 1964.

He is also remembered by C.S. Lewis devotees. It’s hard to look into Walsh without being swamped by information about him in relation to Lewis. It was through reading Lewis — particularly the novel Perelandra — that he was first drawn to faith. Walsh had first written an article about Lewis in The Atlantic Monthly, and then travelled to Oxford to interview him, in preparation for his book C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (first published in 1949, and recently republished by Wipf & Stock in 2008). This book led to the growing popularity of Lewis in the US, which had already started in the UK.

A Quintina Of Crosses

Beyond, beneath, within, wherever blood,
If there were blood, flows with the pulse of love,
Where God’s circle and all orbits cross,
Through the black space of death to baby life
Came God, planting the secret genes of God.

By the permission of a maiden’s love,
Love came upon the seeds of words, broke blood,
And howled into the Palestine of life,
A baby roiled by memories of God.
Sometimes he smiled, sometimes the child was cross.

Often at night he dreamed a dream of God
And was the dream he dreamed. Often across
The lily fields he raged and lived their life,
And Heaven’s poison festered in his blood,
Loosing the passion of unthinkable love.

But mostly, though, he lived a prentice’s life
Until a singing in the surge of blood,
Making a chorus of the genes of God,
Flailed him into the tempest of a love
That lashed the North Star and the Southern Cross.

His neighbors smelled an alien in his blood,
A secret enemy and double life;
He was a mutant on an obscene cross
Outraging decency with naked love.
He stripped the last rags from a proper God.

The life of God must blood this cross for love.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Chad Walsh: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Marilyn Nelson*

Marilyn Nelson is an American poet, translator, children’s book author, professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, and the former Poet Laureate of Connecticut. She has won several awards, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Denise Levertov Award, and the Frost Medal.

Mark Doty has said, “Nelson’s bold and sure poems long for heaven and—happily for us—continue a lifelong affair with the occasions of earth.”

In an interview with Jeanne Murray Walker she said, “I’m not particularly interested in writing about my life. I’m one of the lucky ones, with too happy a life for poetry.” This has led her to researching and writing about the lives of such people as Emmett Till, George Washington Carver, Venture Smith, and some lesser-known people.

The following poem is from For The Body (Louisiana State University Press, 1978).

Churchgoing

The Lutherans sit stolidly in rows;
only their children feel the holy ghost
that makes them jerk and bobble and almost
destroys the pious atmosphere for those
whose reverence bows their backs as if in work.
The congregation sits, or stands to sing,
or chants the dusty creeds automaton.
Their voices drone like engines, on and on,
and they remain untouched by everything;
confession, praise, or likewise, giving thanks.
The organ that they saved years to afford
repeats the Sunday rhythms song by song,
slow lips recite the credo, smother yawns,
and ask forgiveness for being so bored.

I, too, am wavering on the edge of sleep,
and ask myself again why I have come
to probe the ruins of this dying cult.
I come bearing the cancer of my doubt
as superstitious suffering women come
to touch the magic hem of a saint's robe.

Yet this has served two centuries of men
as more than superstitious cant; they died
believing simply. Women, satisfied
that this was truth, were racked and burned with them
for empty words we moderns merely chant.

We sing a spiritual as the last song,
and we are moved by a peculiar grace
that settles a new aura on the place.
This simple melody, though sung all wrong,
captures exactly what I think is faith.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
That slaves should suffer in his agony!
That Christian, slave-owning hypocrisy
nevertheless was by these slaves ignored
as they pitied the poor body of Christ!
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble,
that they believe most, who so much have lost.
To be a Christian one must bear a cross.
I think belief is given to the simple
as recompense for what they do not know.

I sit alone, tormented in my heart
by fighting angels, one group black, one white.
The victory is uncertain, but tonight
I'll lie awake again, and try to start
finding the black way back to what we've lost.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Marilyn Nelson: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Desmond Tutu

Desmond Tutu (1931—2021) is a South African theologian who served as Bishop of Johannesburg (1985—1986) and Archbishop of Cape Town (1986—1996); the first black clergyman to hold either position. He is best known for his active fight against apartheid. In 1990 when Nelson Mandela was released from prison, Tutu and Mandela worked together to establish a multi-racial democracy. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

Archbishop Tutu is the author of An African Prayer Book. It is an anthology which includes prayer poems ranging from early fathers and mothers of the church such as Monica, Augustine, and Clement of Alexandria, to modern writers of the African diasporas. Like the following poem, most of Tutu’s poems are written as prayers.

Disturb us, O Lord

when we are too well-pleased with ourselves
when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little,
because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, O Lord
when with the abundance of things we possess,
we have lost our thirst for the water of life
when, having fallen in love with time,
we have ceased to dream of eternity
and in our efforts to build a new earth,
we have allowed our vision of Heaven to grow dim.
Stir us, O Lord
to dare more boldly, to venture into wider seas
where storms show Thy mastery,
where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.
In the name of Him who pushed back the horizons of our hopes
and invited the brave to follow.
Amen

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Gregory of Nazianus*

Gregory of Nazianus (c. 320—390) is an early Church Father who championed the doctrine of the Trinity against the heresy of Arianism. Along with Basil the Great, he edited a volume of Origen’s theological and devotional writings known as Philocalia.

Gregory was Archbishop of Constantinople from 380 to 381, and served as president of the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 381.

John A. McGuckin in the Preface to The Poetry of Gregory of Nazianzus (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023) wrote, “Gregory elevated poetry as one of the most inspired of all ways to seek the truth, and estimated that the real poet, the profound teacher of deep truths to their generation, was the one who had quietly studied, reflected and learned the trade of expressing those truths…” The following was translated by Brian Dunkle, S.J. and is from Poems on Scripture (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012).

Invocation Before the Reading of Scripture

Attend, O all-seeing Father of Christ, to these our petitions.
Be gracious to your servant’s evening song;
for I am one who sets his footstep on the sacred
paths, who knows God to be the only self-generate among the living
and Christ to be the king who wards off ills from mortals.
He who once, with mercy on the dread race of suffering mortals,
willingly altered his form upon the Father’s offer.
Incorruptible God, he became a mortal, in order that by his blood
he might free all who toil from the chains of Tartarus.
Come now and tend to your servant’s soul
with inspired accounts from the book of holiness and purity.
For thus you might gaze on your servants of the truth
proclaiming true life with a voice as high as heaven.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Gregory of Nazianus: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Anna Kamieńska*

Anna Kamieńska (1920—1986) is a Polish poet, translator, writer, and literary critic. Her earliest poems were published when she was just 14 in the Warsaw children’s magazine Płomyczek. During the Nazi occupation she taught in underground village schools. Later she became involved in Warsaw’s literary life, including as a book reviewer for the prestigious monthly magazine Creativity.

She has been described in Polish American Journal as “a major Polish writer, and equal to Nobel Prize winners Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, [who] grew up in the horrors of Nazi occupation and Communism. She wrote 20 collections of poetry. It was after the death of her husband — the poet Jan Śpiewak when she was just 47 — that she embarked on a journey from unbelief through metaphysical wrestlings to faith. This journey may be observed both through her poetry collections, and her two-volume Notebooks.

The following poem is from Astonishments: Selected poems of Anna Kamieńska (Paraclete, 2007) and was translated from Polish by Grażyna Drabik and David Carson.

The Lamp

I write in order to comprehend not to express myself
I don’t grasp anything I’m not ashamed to admit it
sharing this not knowing with a maple leaf
So I turn with questions to words wiser than myself
to things that will endure long after us
I wait to gain wisdom from chance
I expect sense from silence
Perhaps something will suddenly happen
and pulse with hidden truth
like the spirit of the flame in the oil lamp
under which we bowed our heads
when we were very young
and grandmas crossed the bread with a knife
and we believed in everything
So now I yearn for nothing so much
as for that faith

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Anna Kamieńska: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Andrew Hudgins

Andrew Hudgins is an American poet from Alabama, who has taught at the University of Cincinnati, and Baylor University, and currently teaches at Ohio State. His first book of poems Saints and Strangers (Houghton Mifflin, 1985) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

I bought one of his books years ago — The Never-Ending (Houghton Mifflin, 1991) — when it first came out. This book contains several of the poems that associate him with the Christian faith, however whether he believes, or whether it is merely the protagonists of his poems who believe, is unclear. He often plays mischievously on the edge of heresy to unsettle his readers, such as in “Praying Drunk” and “Piss Christ.”

His American Rendering: New and Selected Poems (Ecco) appeared in 2010. The following poem appears in The Never-Ending.

Communion in the Asylum

We kneel. Some of us kneel better than others
and do not have to clutch the rail or sway
against those next to us. We hold up hands
to take the body in, and some of our hands
— a few — are firmer than the others. They
don't tremble, don't have to be held in the priest's
encircling hands and guided to our lips.
And some of us can hold the wafer, all of it,
inside our mouths. And when the careful priest
tips wine across our lips, many of us, for reverence,
don't moan or lurch or sing songs to ourselves.
But we all await the grace that's promised us.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Robert Grant

Robert Grant (1779 — 1838) is a British poet who was born in India, while his father was the chairman of the East India Company. His family returned to England in 1790. He graduated from Cambridge and became a lawyer, and later a Member of Parliament. He actively sought the removal of “disabilities” that had been imposed upon Jews since the Middle Ages — twice successfully having his bills carried through the House of Commons, only to be rejected by the House of Lords. He was knighted in 1834, and was appointed Governor of Bombay, India, that same year.

The collection Sacred Poems, by Sir Robert Graves, was published posthumously by his brother (Lord Glenelg) in 1839, with a new edition appearing in 1868 (Longmans, Green & Co.). Many of his poems are based on psalms — including “O, Worship the King” which is based on Psalm 104 and became a well-known hymn.

The following poem arose from Psalm 73:25, and has also appeared in edited form as a hymn.

Lord of Earth, Thy Forming Hand

Lord of earth! Thy forming hand
Well this beauteous frame hath planned,
Woods that wave, and hills that tower,
Ocean rolling in his power,
All that strikes the gaze unsought,
All that charms the lonely thought,
Friendship — gem transcending price,
Love — a flower from paradise,
Yet, amid this scene so fair,
Should I cease Thy smile to share,
What were all its joys to me?
Whom have I on earth but Thee?

Lord of heaven! beyond our sight
Rolls a world of purer light;
There in love’s unclouded reign,
Parted hands shall clasp again:
O! that world is passing fair;
Yet, if thou wert absent there,
What were all its joys to me?
Whom have I in heaven but Thee?

Lord of earth and heaven! my breast
Seeks in Thee its only rest;
I was lost; Thy accents mild
Homeward lured Thy wandering child.
I was blind! Thy healing ray
Charmed the long eclipse away;
Source of every joy I know,
Solace of my every woe,
O if once Thy smile divine
Cease upon my soul to shine,
What were earth or heaven to me?
Whom have I in each but Thee?

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Matthew Pullar

Matthew Pullar is an Australian poet, and the author of the new collection This Teeming Mess of Glory (Wipf & Stock, 2025). His earlier collections include The Swelling Year, Les Feuilles Mortes, and Anno Domini. In 2013 he was awarded the SparkLit Young Australian Writer of the Year Award.

As a teacher, he is a Literature and English Teacher at Heathdale Christian College, and is the Cross Curriculum Co-ordinator (First Nations) there.

Andrew Lansdown has said about Pullar’s new collection:
------“While reading Matthew Pullar’s poetry, one is struck by its
------simplicity and directness, prized qualities in any form of
------communication. His poems are mostly confessional and devotional
------in nature and are without pretension or pride. It is refreshing,
------in an age when the political and the perverse seem to predominate
------in the arts, to read poems exploring the fundamentals of human
------existence — family, faith, failure, and grace.”

The most recent post at Poems For Ephesians is also a poem by Matthew Pullar.

The following poem first appeared in Ekstasis, and is from This Teeming Mess of Glory.

Breathbodyprayer

…that form of prayer in which the soul makes use of the members
of the body to raise itself more devoutly to God. In this way the
soul, in moving the body, is moved by it.
------— The Nine Ways of Prayer of Saint Dominic

Fooled by the body’s misfirings —
the thought misdirected; the brain
connecting anguish to the neutral moment —
you cannot pray, for every
earnest ascent is duped by the pounding
head that cries out, Terror, terror
on every side. And you,
longing for peace where there
is no peace, cannot spy the waiting,
pumping heart that welcomes,
that is already here, is open.

So prayer, at these times, is as much
a breath as a hand outstretched,
an air-parched mouth gulping as it clutches clouds.
And while the body,
in its movement, stretches
its wild, warring muscles,
it wrestles and settles

encased behind the billowing
ribs of its maker,
who did not despise these scars.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Cynewulf

Cynewulf (pronounced “kin-eh-wolf”) is a 9th century poet of Old English — one of the few who are known by name, and one of only four whose work is known to survive today. There are only two manuscripts of his work which survive from the early medieval period. He is thought to have lived in Northumbria — due to the Anglian dialect of Anglo-Saxon he wrote in — and believed to be a monk or a priest, because of the sophistication of his poetry, and that he was well-educated enough to have knowledge of works written in Latin.

Because he signed each of the four long poems known to be his, with a runic acrostic signature, there is no debate as to their authorship. He has, at times, also been thought to be the author of other poetic works including The Dream of the Rood.

The following is a prose translation of the opening lines of Cynewulf’s extensive three-part poem The Christ as translated by Charles Huntington Whitman and published in 1900 by the Athenæum Press. The three sections are “The Advent,” “The Ascension,” and “The Last Judgment.”

From The Christ

Thou art the corner-stone which the builders once rejected in their work; fitting indeed is it for Thee, O king of glory, to become the head of this noble temple, and to join in bond secure the broad walls of adamantine rock, so that throughout the cities of earth all things endowed with sight may wonder evermore. Reveal then, righteous and triumphant One through Thy wisdom, Thine own handiwork, and leave wall firm against wall. The work hath need that the Master Builder, the King Himself should come forthwith restore the house that beneath its roof hath fallen into ruin. He formed the body, the limbs of clay; and now is it time for Him, the Prince of life, to deliver this miserable host from their enemies, the wretched from their fears as He full oft hath done.

O Ruler and righteous King, Thou who holdest the key and openest life, bless us with victory, with that glorious success denied unto him whose work availeth naught! Verily in our need do we speak these words: We beseech Him who created man that He chose not to pronounce judgment upon us who, sad at heart, sit yearning in prison for the sun’s joyous course until such time as the Prince of life reveal light unto us, become our soul’s defense, and compass the feeble mind with splendor; or all this may He make us worthy, we whom He admitted to glory when, deprived of our heritage, we were doomed to turn in wretchedness unto this narrow land.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Paul the Apostle

Paul the Apostle (c. 5—c. 64/65 AD), as outlined in the Acts of the Apostles, was a persecutor of the early Christian church, until Jesus spoke to him on the road to Damascus. He became the apostle to the Gentiles — journeying throughout the Roman world. He is the author of a large portion of the New Testament — written in the form of letters to individuals and to young churches in such locations as Ephesus, Galatia, Corinth, and Rome.

Perhaps due to the nature of his letters, which focus on teaching, admonishing and encouraging, he is not thought of as a poetic writer. However, Paul often used poetic descriptions to help his readers to better understand. For example, in Ephesians 6 he writes of the armour of God, comparing salvation, righteousness and faith to the armour used by Roman soldiers. Likewise, in 1 Corinthians 12 he compares people in the church to parts of the body — having the foot saying it is not as worthy as the hand to be part of the body.

The following is one of the most celebrated poetic passages in the New Testament. Often called the love chapter, it is often read at weddings, and woven into song lyrics. Joni Mitchell performs her own close paraphrase of the passage, from her 1982 album Wild Things Run Fast.

Here is the passage from the New International Version.

1 Corinthians 13

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Edith Sitwell*

Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) is a modernist poet and critic. She received the Benson Medal in 1934 from the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1953 was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE).

She and her two younger brothers — Osbert and Sacheverell who both also experienced literary success — experienced a childhood of mistreatment and neglect by their parents. In 1918 she met and became friends with the poet and war hero Siegfried Sassoon. According to her biographer Richard Greene she fell in love with Sassoon, even though she knew that he was a homosexual. Similarly, she later fell in love with the gay Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, whom she helped both financially and through her influence . Edith Sitwell never did marry, but lived for many years in the company of her former governess Helen Rootham. Her flat became a meeting place for writers, several of whom she helped to become established.

In the 21st century Dame Edith Sitwell is best known for her poem “Still Falls the Rain” — a poem about the Blitz of London during WWII.

Dirge for the New Sunrise

Fifteen minutes past eight o’clock, on the
morning of Monday the 6th of August, 1945

Bound to my heart as Ixion to the wheel,
Nailed to my heart as the Thief upon the Cross
I hang between our Christ and the gap where the world was lost

And watch the phantom Sun in Famine Street
— The ghost of the heart of Man…red Cain,
And the more murderous brain
Of Man, still redder Nero that conceived the death
Of his mother Earth, and tore
Her womb, to know the place where he was conceived.

But no eyes grieved —
For none were left for tears:
They were blinded as the years

Since Christ was born. Mother or Murderer, you have given
or taken life —
Now all is one!

There was a morning when the holy Light
Was young…The beautiful First Creature came

To our water-springs, and thought us without blame.

Our hearts seemed safe in our breasts and sang to the light —
The marrow in the bone
We dreamed was safe…the blood in the veins, the sap in the tree
Were springs of the Deity.

But I saw the little Ant-men as they ran
Carrying the world’s weight of the world’s filth
And the filth in the heart of Man —
Compressed till those lusts and greeds had a greater heat than
that of the Sun.

And the ray from that heat came soundless, shook the sky
As if in search for food, and squeezed the stems
Of all that grows on the earth till they were dry.
The eyes that saw, the lips that kissed, are gone
— Or black as thunder lie and grin at the murdered Sun.

The living blind and seeing dead together lie
As if in love…There was no more hating then —
And no more love: Gone is the heart of Man.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Edith Sitwell: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.